Drawings of Victor Hugo

The great romantic painter, Delacroix, wrote to Victor Hugo that, had he decided to become a painter instead of a writer, he would have outshone the artists of their century.
Many of Hugo's paintings have survived. One recognizes in them accomplished draughtsmanship, boldness of execution and a sense of powerful creativity. Today his artwork still has the power to astonish us by the skill, the strong composition, and often by theatrical effects of light and shade which seem to have been achieved by the poet-draughtsman under a direct spell of inspiration. Victor Hugo drew incessantly. He also studied the characteristics of his chosen materials or media under all possible angles. He rose above contemporary conventions and did not hesitate to elaborate on accidental effects if they satisfied his aesthetic sense. The result sometimes looked more like a 20th century abstract than a simple doodle. Jersey Heritage Trust

"Once paper, pen-and-ink-well have been brought to the table, Victor Hugo sits down and without making a preliminary sketch, without any apparent preconception, sets about drawing with an extraordinarily sure hand not the landscape as a whole but any old detail. He will begin his forest with the branch of a tree, his town with a gable, his gable with a weathervane, and little by little, the entire composition will emerge from the blank paper with the precision and clarity of a photographic negative subjected to the chemical preparation that brings out the picture. That done, the draftsman will ask for a cup and will finish off his landscape with a light shower of black coffee. The result is a unexpected and powerful drawing that is often strange, always personal, and recalls the etchings of Rembrandt and Piranesi." Charles Hugo

Victor Hugo"Heraldic eagle" (Study of an eagle for a coat of arms), painted in Jersey ca. 1855.Silhouette of fine cut-out marked out with soft charcoal. Penned and painted in brown and blue ink with some lace print worked into the body of the bird.

Victor Hugo"Old House" ca.1856 Ink wash on paper cut-out, mounted on a support

Victor Hugo"The Upper Rhine", painted in Jersey, January 1st, 1855Pen and brown ink wash, blue and sienna watercolour, highlights of white gouache; painted and blurred with feather and fingerprints on beige paper. Framed with a thin band of gilt paper and mounted on vellum. (60mmx190mm)

What Hugo was searching for in these drawings were signs that would stimulate his imagination and suggest directions for his pen. Hugo interpreted these foldings, not for psychological purposes like the Swiss physician Hermann Rorschach with his famous tests introduced in 1921, but like a seer. He developed the symmetry, discerned resemblances, discovered figures and carried out all kinds of permutations. Reversal (or, better still, reversability), metamorphoses and fusion were themes so firmly rooted in Hugo's praxis that one commonly finds in his compositions a landscape reflected in water or a figure that reads equally well either way up. Florian Rodari.